Christmas songs aren’t made—they’re earned. Or so we’ve been led to believe from the struggle that Moncton’s FM Berlin has had in bringing one to the light of day. After three years of trying on and off, the band have readied a Holiday EP for this season, complete with their own festive version of the Fireplace Channel.
Timing aside, it’s unsurprising if FM Berlin have experienced a little performance anxiety. Christmas music isn’t just the sort of genre you can waltz into; it is literally built on tradition, full of conventions and rules and a rich canon that is nearly impossible to compete with. It’s understandable if FM Berlin took a few extra seasons to get it right.
“Each year around October, we pick it back up and try to have it ready for the end of November, which it totally insane, but we’ve done it that way for the last three years now,” says Corey Hachey, FM Berlin’s frontman. “Finally, we were able to finish it this time around.
“Around The Sun,” the band’s first of two singles that form their Holiday EP is also FM Berlin’s first attempt producing everything in-house, with the exception of the mastering which was done by John McLaggan (Tomato/Tomato) at Parachute Mastering in Saint John, New Brunswick.
“It’s a song about the chaos that goes along with the Holiday season, and how we somehow manage to find our way back from the brink regardless of what the previous year has thrown at us,” says Hachey.
That’s a pretty fitting theme for “Around The Sun,” especially considering that the band says the only way their Holiday EP was completed this year was through a bit of luck.
“That’s pretty well the case with any of the songs that we actually manage to finish. There are so many songs that just never make it to that stage for one reason or another. The ones that do only get there because something interesting happened at the right time and someone was paying close enough attention to catch it,” says Hachey.
“This year, we were lucky enough to be listening to the right things at the right time and it just sort of came together. I wish there was a more logical explanation, but then again what fun would that be? We’d be going from writing music to working on an assembly line… no thanks.”
FM Berlin also hedged their bets by recording their own version of the classic “Good King Wenceslas”.
“We stripped things down a bit and mess around with the arrangement,” says Hachey. “It’s definitely an FM Berlin song now.”
While the band’s Yule Log currently has a home on YouTube, FM Berlin’s two-song Holiday EP will become available on all streaming platforms on December 15, 2021